Quotes on Writing Advice

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.